Dear Daughter,

What I didn’t tell you is that I sat in the front row of the reading, ready to smile and to give a good introduction like a good host. What I didn’t tell you is that when the reader had a white character call an Asian American one a squintyeyed feckless cunt, I remembered all the times when others took their fingers and pulled their eyes wide into a horizon. All the times people yelled Chink! to my family or me. The time someone wrote Chink on our driveway in chalk.

What I didn’t tell you is that the reader intimidated me with his confidence. That my mother never taught me how to speak to white people, to loud white people. Shake the hands of confident white people. Speak in front of white people. At a lectern. With a white piece of paper with black type on it.

What I didn’t tell you is that I envied Joan Didion, not only for her writing but also because she had things passed down to her, that she knew what her great-great-great-great-great-grandparents did. I identified more with Nora Krug, when she wrote: In my mind, a family began with one’s parents and ended with oneself.^xxiv

What I didn’t tell you is that after the reader’s comment, I wondered if I should have gotten up and gone to the bathroom. Whether I should have cried in the bathroom. I wondered how to fight my urge to take the microphone away from him.

Instead, I stared at my dark Taiwanese hands from Father, my long thin Northern Chinese hands from Mother. I was furious at my hands. At myself. At my history. At my inability to do anything with those hands. I was upset that my mother and father didn’t spray the chalk off our driveway, instead waiting for the sun to erase it. Not erased, the word etched into my skin.

What I didn’t tell you is that I got up to introduce another poet I had been looking forward to meeting. And then I sat down. My hands illuminated atop the lectern, white for just a few seconds, then brown again.

Dear Daughter, I did tell you what happened, and it was only after I had told you, after you had gone to bed, that I wonder if I had wrongly passed my pain onto you. Wrongly wept my tears into your body. I wondered if you suffer like I do, in school, on the playground, in class, with your teachers, looking at ads, watching TV. Or do you not suffer like I do?

You were born in a more diverse and progressive state. You are half Asian and half white. Does that mean you experience half the racism? That you feel half the pain? Or, alongside your own pain, do you inherit all of your grandmother’s pain, my pain, America’s pain?

I thought hard about whether to stay silent. About whether to tell you. Staying silent was following in my mother’s footsteps. But by telling you, I risked adversely shaping your views of the world—as an unfair one, as a racist one, as one where we would be victims.

I’ve since thought harder about why I was so upset. The racial slur had been dropped into a piece with no apparent purpose and thus never transcended its own racism. In that way, the randomness of the slur was affirming the slur itself, as well as negative stereotypes of Asian American women. I could tell you more about the aftermath and the response of the writer and his friend but then I’d have to relive those dreadful experiences.

Do you remember the boy on the patio? How he pulled his eyes wide at us and suddenly the same thin line? Do you remember what I said to the boy? You don’t want to make fun of people for what they look like, right? The boy, maybe ten, our friend’s child, someone you had played with many times before, just laughed. Do you know how hard it was for me to speak up, even to a ten-year-old? Do you know how astonished I was that so much had changed but so much hadn’t?

If I don’t know how to protect myself, how can I protect you? I know that even though I was born on this land, in a small hospital in Detroit, Michigan, that my sun is still brittle. That if my sun even exists, it is behind all the other suns and emits radio static.

I promise not to pass handfuls of hate into your hands. I promise to teach you how to be the bird and the beak. And the sky with many other birds.

The next morning, we ate breakfast, got you ready for camp, ignored the loud hawk that circled above the cabin. When I grabbed my computer bag and opened the front door, a bright white triangular light blinded us. And we moved through it.